柏忠毅的 'the Daily Biff' - Product Review: Pandigital 7-inch Photo Frame

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Mon, 11 Jun 2007

Product Review: Pandigital 7-inch Photo Frame
I picked up a Pandigital 7-inch Photo Frame today from my nearby Staples ($89). We bought it as a gift to give to our longtime child care provider, Lori, who is going away to college. I spent the better part of this evening playing around with it and am very unimpressed with the product.

The photo frame includes the common features found on most photo frames: 128 MB built-in memory, slots for a variety of external memory cards, mp3 support, and a slideshow feature. The first thing I tried was to just dump some MP3 files and some full-sized pictures onto the internal memory and see what would happen. The result was a slideshow of some very poorly re-sized pictures on a poor quality LCD monitor. The upside was that the music sounded great! I realized that I wasn't going to be able to do anything about the poor LCD hardware (hey... I get what I pay for), but I played around with the picture sizing so that I could avoid the built-in non-smart re-sizing included in the frame. After a few attempts, I was able to get a decent result - not great, but good enough.

Pandigital's bios/UI leaves a lot (a lot!) to be desired. It is slow, clunky, and less than friendly. Furthermore, the on-frame controls are completely non-intuitive (fortunately the remote works well). I would expect that if I owned or kept this product for myself that I would not change pictures very often, just to avoid the experience of working with the frame. But once the frame is set up, it functions ok... just don't look too closely at the quality. The more expensive pandigital frames probably have better LCD screens, but they all likely share the same crappy UI. Yuck.

I would not recommend this product except to those that are looking for something that is cheap; there must be better options out there.

(Postscript Sun Jun 24 19:07:41 PDT 2007 // Kristy bought another one of these today from Staples for her Dad for Father's Day. It appears that the buttons have been updated with a new revision of the model, but no upgrades to the bios. The LCD quality seems worse with this model than the previous one. Not good.)

:: Posted by rus on Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:35 pm
:: Filed under /reviews/products

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